By Catherine Tebaldi

22nd March 2023 In Insights

Introduction

Digital traditionalist women carefully cultivate winsome images on Instagram: harvesting fields of beets with the folds of muslin dresses and aprons spilling around bare feet, canning and pickling them in vegetable jars surrounded by laughing blonde children. In the winter, the family stamps sugar cookies with intricate runic patterns, or braid evergreen branches and holly to celebrate the festival of Yule. The accompanying text and videos celebrate health and wellness, but this goes beyond simply bodily health to what they call “reviving folk vitality”: celebrating northern European tradition, heroic men and women at home with a large white family; herbalism and natural health; paganism and occult mythology, and the belief in a white racial spirituality.

This ideology has can be traced through history to the ‘fascist ecology’ of the Third Reich; the Nazi Party had a ‘green wing’ preoccupied with ecology, eugenics and esoteric racial essences.  To describe the group with deep roots in the far-right and in contemporary practices of health and nature I use the term Granola Nazis. Their style is taken up by a broader anti-modern movement of digital traditionalism.

This Insight explores the far-right politics of Granola Nazis and Digital Traditionalism – a visual and cultural style in which highly online influencers celebrate a pre-internet culture – a spiritual celebration of ‘ancestral life’ or neo-hippie calls to go ‘back to the land’. While some celebrate farming, health and organic food, others go back to the spirituality, morality and social values not merely of a pre-internet era but of a pre-feminist or pre-civil rights era. Granola Nazis, aligned with groups known as ‘crunchy moms’ and anti-semitic ‘raw egg nationalists’,  blend organic living with far-right politics, linking nature and whiteness with anti-feminist leanings.

This link between nature and Nazism has deep roots in the Folkish Movement, a revival of the Nazi Germany era Volkisch movement which celebrated a racial essence formed through a natural link to the land. I explore two key folkish sites; the first traces their history and importance for white nationalism, and the second looks at the digital spread of their traditionalist subcultural style. I demonstrate how the Folkish Movement effectively uses far-right digital strategies to spread, normalise, and advertise its content.

Digital Traditionalism

Granola Nazis are central in the movement I term ‘digital traditionalism’, or the seemingly contradictory online celebration of pre-digital life, which also encodes deeply right-wing social values as atavistic tradition.  Much of this media frames itself as a metapolitical battle against corrupt, global modernity and towards an idealised natural tradition.  This is manifested in the fight against multiple anti-White conspiracies, from David Lane’s ‘white genocide‘, to the ‘great replacement‘ theory or the recent ‘great reset’.  These conspiracies are shared across the right, from neo-Nazis to mainstream conservative and Christian discourses, for example, the mainstream campus conservative group Turning Point USA or the views of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.  Digital traditionalism links the esoteric side of health and wellness trends with idealised tradition, spirituality and whiteness in aestheticised landscapes and images of family life, celebrating nature and fertility.

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